So PBS, in its annual ritual of self-flagellation-by-parenthesis, decided to slip a little historical footnote into the Fourth of July programming. You know the one: “By the way, those democratic ideals you’re celebrating? Yeah, the Iroquois kind of had that whole federalism thing going first.” And sure, fine. Credit where it’s due. Historical accuracy isn’t the enemy here.

But here’s what’s really going on, and it’s the kind of thing that would make a lesser journalist’s head spin. PBS—and by extension the entire liberal establishment—isn’t actually sorry about what happened to the Natives. They’re not sorry in any way that costs anything. They’re sorry the way a man who ran over your dog is sorry—while he’s already backing over the cat.

Because here’s the logic they want you to swallow: We regret the genocide. We would have stopped it. We would have lived as equals. We would never have forced them into shrinking enclaves, destroyed their buffalo, burned their crops. But—and this is the crucial part—it’s too late now. What’s done is done. Tragic. Anyway, pass the potato salad.

This is the liberal get-out-of-jail-free card. You can express unlimited remorse for the past as long as you don’t have to do a single thing in the present. It’s a theology of convenient grief—a sort of moral insurance policy that costs exactly nothing and yields maximum self-congratulation.

But what if there were a situation, unfolding right this very minute, funded by your tax dollars, shielded by your diplomatic might, where exactly the same thing is happening? What if there was a native population being systematically stripped of land, crammed into walled enclaves, denied the right to return to homes that are now occupied by people who showed up seventy-eight years ago with guns and a divine deed? What if—and stay with me here—what if the United States could, at this very moment, prove that it actually learned something? That it wasn’t just blowing historical smoke up its own rear end?

That situation is called Palestine.

And the silence from the very people who weep into their handkerchiefs over Wounded Knee is deafening.

If the regret were real, you would see a single demand: right of return. Full citizenship. Equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea. You would see sanctions. You would see the aid spigot—the billions of dollars we’ve funneled to Israel every year since Truman was in office—turned completely off. You would see Americans finally acknowledging that we created this monster, we armed it, we gave it diplomatic cover at the UN, we could have stopped the Nakbah in 1948 but actively chose not to, and we have continued to choose not to every single day since.

But that would require admitting something. That would require admitting that the “two-state solution” isn’t a solution at all—it’s a permanent normalization of land theft, a way to make Palestinian statelessness official policy while everyone shakes hands and smiles for the cameras.

So instead, we get the waiting game.

Here’s the plan, as best I can tell: We wait. We keep our heads down. We let Israel do what it’s doing—shrinking Palestinian existence, walling them in, reducing them to an ever-smaller fraction of what they had, clandestinely trickle-expelling them to other countries. We let the refugee camps fester for another generation or two hoping their host countries would eventually throw their hands up and just give them citizenship. We let the ethnic cleansing run its course until there’s barely anything left to argue about.

And then—then—when it’s all over, when the Palestinians have been reduced to a historical footnote of their own, when there’s nothing left but museum exhibits and the occasional PBS documentary—that’s when we’ll weep. That’s when we’ll gather our Palestinian flag handkerchiefs and mourn. That’s when we’ll say, “We should have done something. We should have given them the right to return. We should have treated them like South Africans and ended apartheid.”

And then we’ll add the magic words: “But it’s too late now. What’s done is done.“

It’s a beautiful, airtight system of perpetual moral absolution. You get to feel terrible about history while actively funding the next chapter of it. You get to hold the shovel and cry about the hole at the same time. And when the hole is deep enough, you can cover it over, plant a flag, and give a speech about how you would have done things differently if only you’d been in charge.

That’s the game. That’s always been the game. And if you think for one second that the establishment liberals are actually serious about breaking it, I’ve got a federally funded documentary on Native American contributions to democracy that I’d like to sell you.